Thursday, July 31, 2008

Talk about Pressure

The Olympics are just a week away and most of the news out of Beijing is how bad the air quality is. NBC might need to put night vision onto cameras to get good pictures out of China.

I was struck yesterday by a story about Michael Phelps' efforts to beat Mark Spitz' record of 7 Gold in the '72 games. Spitz went into the games in Munich with a lot of hype but no one expected him to win 7 Gold medals! Experts are predicting the Baltimore native will take 8 Gold medals! What if he wins only 5 Golds...will he be a bust?...hardly. Phelps is a very humble kid who just loves to swim. His legacy will be that he dominated his sport for 5 years like no one has every dominated the sport, including Spitz.

I'm not sure how much of the games I will watch. Beijing is 12 hours ahead of us so most events will be occurring at least half a day ahead of when they appear on NBC. There isn't going to be a lot of suspense about the results because of all the internet coverage for these games. I may tune in for some of the Phelps races and also check-out some of the Volleyball action. The good news is that a good amount of the events will be provided for on-line live viewing. That might be fun but I'm not taking my laptop to the beach when I'm on vacation next month.